Baseball Weather - Golden Gate Weather Services

Baseball Weather

It's only the second week of the baseball season and already radio and television announcers are bobbling what should be easy weather ground-balls. The most egregious errors are usually misstatements about the humidity and why the ball doesn't go as far. NOT!

The difference in the distance a 375 foot homerun travels when the humidity is 20% and when it is 60% is less than a foot. And the difference in the amount that a 90 mph curveball breaks is only a tenth of an inch. (There may be some absorption of moisture by a baseball on a particularly muggy day, but those amounts have been found to also be negligible).

The temperature (and thus the air density) has a slightly greater impact with the difference in the distance of a home run on a 50 degree day being about 16 feet less than on a 90 degree day. The altitude above sea level and corresponding air lower density difference means a 375 foot homer at sea level would travel about 405 feet at Coors Field in Denver.

But the meteorological element with the greatest impact is the wind. Just a 5 mph tailwind will carry that 375 foot home run to 415 feet and a 10 mph wind will translate to an epic 455 foot blast.

The bottom line is that if you want to see really long homeruns go to Denver on a hot dry day with the wind blowing out!

A more detailed treatment of the topic can be found in last year’s Jan/Feb issue of Weatherwise Magazine (http://www.weatherwise.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/2014/January-February%202014/rain-delays-full.html )

Play ball.

Jan Null, CCM
Golden Gate Weather Service
http://ggweather.com

Jan Null

Jan Null has been a meteorologist in the San Francisco Bay Area for over four-nine decades and is frequently seen on television and heard on the radio when weather is in the news. Twenty-six years ago he founded a consulting firm, Golden Gate Weather Services, after a 24-year career with the National Weather Service. Mr. Null is a Bay Area native, having grown up in Oakland and lived in the East Bay until 2006 when he moved to Saratoga. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Atmospheric Science from UC Davis in 1974 and his Master’s from San Jose State in 1992. Jan joined the National Weather Service in 1974 at the Weather Service Forecast Office in Redwood City. He worked as an operational forecaster throughout his career, including 13 years as Lead Forecaster. During his tenure at the NWS he also served as Meteorologist-in-Charge at the Center Weather Service Unit at the FAA’s Air Traffic Control Center in Fremont. He also did extensive research into the relationship between El Niño, La Niña and California rainfall and throughout his career he was a frequent media spokesperson for the agency. Jan has also been an Adjunct Professor and Lecturer at San Francisco and San Jose State Universities where he taught one evening a week for nearly 30 years. In 1998, Jan founded Golden Gate Weather Services, a consulting firm that specializes in forensic meteorology. He frequently serves as an expert witness in litigation where the weather is a factor. This often involves reconstructing past weather events or as his wife refers to it: “CSI Weather”. Mr. Null is also an internationally recognized expert of the sad topic of the heatstroke deaths of children in vehicles. After the death of a child left a vehicle in San Jose in 2001 he did a comprehensive study of vehicle temperatures that was ultimately published in Pediatrics in 2005. Since that time he has spoken at numerous national conferences and worked with a wide variety of child safety advocacy groups and agencies to raise awareness about the dozens of children who die from hyperthermia in hot vehicles each year. This data continues to be updated at NOHeatstroke.org. In his spare time he is a serious amateur photographer, specializing in wildlife and landscapes. Jan is married to Susan Hollis, a lifelong Saratoga resident and Realtor. He has two adult children in the Bay Area and the world’s most adorable 9-year old granddaughter and 4-year grandson.

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